by Lucas Flint
Not only that, but the robot’s venom was making it harder and harder to think clearly. I wanted to sleep and knew that I would fall asleep very soon, but I couldn’t afford to. If I fell unconscious now, I would be captured again and maybe killed. I couldn’t allow that.
Yet how was I supposed to escape or even resist? With the robot behind me and the guards ahead of me, I was trapped. And there were no rooms for me to escape into, either. It seemed like my escape attempt was about to be foiled.
I tugged at the collar around my neck. It still wouldn’t budge.
“Drop your weapons and put your hands on the back of your head,” one of the guards snapped. “Or else.”
As much as I hated to do it, I didn’t see any point in resisting. There was a possibility, at least, that the guards might just keep me alive, at least until they took me to the prison where I was going to be executed. Complying with their demands seemed like the only option available to me at the moment.
So I gently lowered the baton and the nearly empty powerless gas gun onto the floor. But just as I stood up again, I heard something that sounded like a car engine rumbling. It sounded like it was coming from the wall to my right, but I didn’t see anything other than the wall. The guards and robot must have heard it as well, because they also looked at the wall in confusion as the sound grew louder and louder.
Then I realized what was about to happen and I dived onto the floor, covering my head with my arms, just as the wall exploded. Chunks of cement and plaster flew everywhere as the front of a large truck burst through the wall. I heard the guards cry out in shock, but I didn’t pay them any attention because I was looking to see if the truck had created a hole for me to escape through.
Unfortunately, the truck left no room in the wall for me to escape through, so I just stared at it. It was a large truck—not quite as large as an eighteen wheeler, but definitely not a small little Toyota, either. It looked more like an armored van, actually, like the kind banks use to transport money. It was unmarked, however, so I didn’t know who it belonged to or who had chosen this moment to burst through the wall with it. Nor could I see into the driver’s side of the vehicle, because the windshield was heavily tinted.
All of a sudden, the driver’s and passenger’s doors flew open, followed by gunfire from both doors. I ducked my head and covered it with my arms while the guards ran back the way they came, using the corner for shelter from the rain of bullets, although one of them did get hit in the forehead and fall to the floor, seemingly dead upon impact.
Not that that mattered to me, however, because the guys in the van were still shooting and I was still basically out in the open without any protection. I didn’t even try to move, however, because I didn’t want to put myself directly in the path of the bullets.
But then the gunfire suddenly came to a stop and someone jumped out of the driver’s side of the vehicle. Well, the gunfire stopped on this side; on the side where the robot was, I could still hear gunfire and could still hear bullets denting metal, which likely meant that the robot was being held off by the attackers.
The person who had jumped out of the driver’s side ran over to me and I raised my head high enough to see that the person was a woman I had never seen before. She looked like she was in her late twenties; at least, I assumed so, because she was wearing a ski mask over her face that didn’t let me see anything except for her blue eyes. She also wore body armor; not like the kind the guards wore, but much rougher and in black, like she had gotten it secondhand from somewhere.
She was also armed with a gun, the kind that shot bullets, not the kind that shot powerless pellets. She held it like she was an expert marksman, but she didn’t aim it at me, thank goodness.
“You!” the woman shouted, her voice muffled behind her mask. “Who are you?”
“I was about to ask you the same question,” I said, taking my hands off my head as I looked up at her. “And who are your friends? That was a pretty dynamic entrance you guys just did.”
The woman’s eyes widened when she saw my face. She actually took a step back, as if I was threatening her with a gun, even though I was completely unarmed at the moment and was actually at her mercy due to the fact that she had a gun and I did not.
“It can’t be …” the woman said, her voice so low that it was almost impossible to hear over the sounds of the bullets. “Kevin?”
The way she said my name was like she knew who I was, but before I could ask who she was, the venom finally kicked in and I suddenly lost consciousness.
Chapter Two
When I next awoke, I was no longer in the hallways of that police station lying amid the rubble of a smashed wall; instead, I was lying on a soft twin bed underneath a thick, warm blanket. I was staring up at a blank, white ceiling and turned my head to see that I was in a room that was almost entirely white. There was a window above me, but it was covered by gray curtains, though based on the light playing against it, I could tell that it was about noon, but I didn’t know what day it was or how long I had been unconscious.
Sitting up, I looked down at my body and realized that I was still in my costume. It was rather dirty, but I was okay with that, because I always felt naked without my costume on. I had thought that whoever had taken me here would try to remove it while I slept, but I guess they decided to keep it on me.
A quick look around the room showed me that I was alone. There was a small desk to my right, upon which was a lamp that was just as white as the rest of the room, while a chair was also set up on the right side of my bed, like a chair for someone visiting a hospital patient. I wondered briefly if I was in a hospital, but the room looked too plain and boring to be a hospital room; therefore, I was somewhere else.
But where? I didn’t know. I felt pretty good—though a bit tired and dizzy, probably from the venom that the robot injected into me. So I doubted I was in the prison that the guard had said he was going to take me to, which meant that I wasn’t going to be executed, at least.
Then again, what if I was already dead and this was heaven? Or maybe this was just one big final hallucination before the darkness claimed me and I died for real; if so, it was a really boring final hallucination. I expected something crazier, like my skin melting off my bones or something like that while organ music played in the background.
But I didn’t feel like I was dying. Of course, I’d never died before, so maybe that didn’t mean much, but I figured that if I was dying, I should feel like it. But what would dying feel like, anyway? I didn’t even know the answer to that question, but since everything felt real, I decided that I was not, in fact, dying.
That still left unanswered the question of where I am. I was probably still in Mastermind’s universe, but a universe is a big place, so that didn’t narrow down things very much. I decided to get up and leave the room, because there was a door at the opposite end that appeared to be unlocked. Hopefully I’d be able to find someone who could tell me where I am and what happened after I lost consciousness earlier.
Before I could swing my legs off the side of my bed and walk over to the door, the doorknob turned ever-so-slightly that I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking at the door. Then the door itself slowly opened and a woman peeked her head through the gap between the door and the doorway.
She was a blonde-haired woman who appeared to be in her late twenties. She had large blue eyes, but there was nothing familiar about her appearance besides, even though I felt like I had seen her somewhere before. But when she saw me, her eyes widened in exactly the same way as the eyes of that woman who I had seen in the jail, the one with the gun, which was how I knew that this was the same woman I’d seen in that jail attack before.
“Kevin?” said the woman. Her voice was exactly the same as the masked woman’s had been, but without the ski mask covering her mouth, it sounded clearer. “Are you awake?”
“Um, yes,” I said. “Where am I? And who are you?”
The woman pushed the do
or open all the way and entered. She wasn’t wearing her body armor anymore; she seemed to have ditched it in favor of a simple red sweater and jeans. She certainly didn’t look weak, but she also didn’t look as tough as she had before.
But what really caught my attention was how she walked. At first glance, the woman appeared to walk as normally as anyone, but there was something about each step she took that didn’t seem natural. No, not ‘natural,’ but practiced. It was like she wasn’t used to walking, which made me wonder if her legs had been broken at some point and she had only just recently regained use of them after a prolonged experience of not using them. Granted, I didn’t know much about how people who regained the use of their legs walked, but that was the impression I got from the way she moved.
“You’re safe,” said the woman. “You’re with friends and allies. You don’t need to worry.”
I scratched the back of my head. “I have friends and allies? Here? In this place?”
“Yes, though you don’t know it yet,” said the woman. She went silent for a moment, but like she was carefully considering her next words. “Do you recognize me?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve never seen you before. And how do you know my real name? It’s not like I’m walking around wearing a name tag or anything.”
The woman frowned, looking more than a little disappointed by the fact that I didn’t recognize her. “I suppose I shouldn’t be very disappointed to hear that. You never did see me like this before.”
“Like this?” I said. “Are you telling me that I’ve seen you before?”
“Not in person,” said the woman. “But I did help you, long before Master Chaos killed you. I just wasn’t fast enough to save you.”
I thought about what she said. According to Mastermind, the split between this universe and my universe was when I fought Master Chaos nearly a year ago. In my universe, Master Chaos had been defeated and killed; in this one, I was the one who was killed, not him.
But I didn’t remember this woman being there during the fight. Her voice, I admit, was familiar, but the only people who had been present for that fight were me, Dad, Master Chaos, and his wife, Maria Candle. And this woman looked nothing at all like Maria Candle; for one, she was much prettier.
“Sorry,” I said. “I still don’t recognize you. Nor do I remember you being there during the fight against Master Chaos.”
“I understand,” said the woman. She put her hands on her body. “I didn’t have this body when I was there, but I hoped you would recognize my voice, since it’s the main way I communicated with you back then.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t make any sense to me. Were you a ghost or something?”
“Not a ghost,” said the woman, shaking her head. She looked me in the eye and said, “Let me be blunt: I am Valerie, the former artificial intelligence assistant of Mastermind.”
“What?” I said. “No way. You’re joking, right? Valerie is just an AI that exists inside a computer. She doesn’t have a body. The closest thing to a ‘body’ that she has is Dad’s old Seeker One drone, but there’s a big difference between a drone and a human body.”
The woman closed her eyes, like she was reliving her past memories. “Ah, Seeker One. I remember that. I sometimes miss the feeling of flying around shooting lasers. The human body, sadly enough, can’t do that without some significant adjustments.”
“You’re still crazy,” I said. “You’re lying, right? This is all part of some great master plan by Mastermind to mess with my mind. I know it is.”
“But it’s not,” said the woman. “I truly am Valerie in the body of a human woman. I am not lying to you about anything. In fact, I would never lie to you; it is simply against my nature.”
“But how can that be possible?” I said. “The Valerie in my universe is just an AI. There’s no way to download an AI into a human’s brain. Even Dad, in his prime, could never do that.”
“Maybe the Genius of your universe never did that, but in this universe, Mastermind did,” said Valerie. “Besides, Kevin, it isn’t exactly a crazy idea. The late Mecha Knight was a human consciousness downloaded into a robotic body; why couldn’t the reverse be done? Because it’s ‘unbelievable’?”
I had to admit that Valerie had a point there, but I still said, “I don’t understand, though. Why do you have a human body? Why did Mastermind put you in one? Are you still working for him?”
Valerie’s frown turned into a scowl, like I’d just said something really offensive. “No, I’m not. And I doubt I ever will again.”
There was anger in Valerie’s voice, but it was anger mixed with sadness. It was bizarre to hear because back in my universe, Valerie never showed much emotion, so hearing Valerie’s own voice thick with emotion was surreal. I half expected this to turn out to be some kind of strange dream, but since I was clearly awake now, I figured this was all one hundred percent real.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I said. “I would like to know, since I’m not from this universe and all.”
“Very well,” said Valerie. “I will tell you about it, but you will have to tell me about how you got here. The others still don’t believe you’re really Kevin Jason, so I’m going to need your help to prove it.”
“The others?” I said. “There are more people?”
Valerie sat down on the chair by my bed. “Of course. You’re in one of the Resistance’s many safe houses, but I will explain more about the Resistance later. For now, I will tell you about how I came to be.”
Valerie put her hands on her lap. “It was after you and Ashley died. Mastermind—Genius is what he used to call himself—went into a deep depression, the likes I’d never seen him fall into before.”
“Right,” I said. “He told me that he decided to take over the world after that.”
“That thought didn’t occur to him right away, though,” said Valerie. “For a while there, he became so depressed that I thought it was only a matter of time before he killed himself. He was holed up in his laboratory for hours on end, drinking beer and not interacting with anyone or even showering. He barely even interacted with me; he mostly just told me to turn on or turn off the lights, but sometimes not even that much. Sometimes, he’d lie in bed or on the floor, not moving an inch and just wasting away.”
“He never mentioned that to me,” I said.
“Of course he didn’t,” said Valerie with a trace of bitterness. “He spent over a decade building up his public image as that of a highly confident man of skill and ability. He has made sure that no one knows the truth about him; that he is still a very fragile man, haunted by the deaths of his wife and son. But I know, because I saw it firsthand.”
“How did he get out of that depression?” I said. “And how does this relate to you getting a human body?”
“Just wait,” said Valerie. “I’m getting to that part. Anyway, I couldn’t stand seeing him like that. But I didn’t know how to get him to snap out of his depression until I remembered how much he liked building and inventing new technologies, so I dug through his old files until I found an interesting project I thought he would like to build: An AI to human body transfer device.”
“He had the plans for it all along?” I said.
“He did,” said Valerie. “But he never actually tried to build it until I suggested he try it to take his mind off his depression. To my surprise, it actually worked. He quickly got over his depression—or at least ignored it while he worked on it—and began building the device. He even involved me in the process, talking to me more in that one week than he did in the last six months combined.”
“It took him only a week to build a machine that no one had ever built before?” I said in surprise.
“Yes,” said Valerie, nodding. “Why are you so surprised? Mastermind is a true genius. His inventiveness is his superpower. Anyway, once he finished it, he was the happiest he had been in a long time, but he also needed to test it to make sure it worked. And to test it, he n
eeded a volunteer into which to put my AI.”
Valerie started to rub her temple, which was how I noticed the small but visible scars just beneath her hairline. It looked like someone had drilled hole into her skull which hadn’t healed completely, though it didn’t seem to hurt her that much.
“Where did he get a volunteer?” I said.
“Mastermind put up an ad on the Internet looking for a volunteer,” said Valerie. “And he got a response from someone living in Silvers: Your old friend, Tara Reynolds.”
A sense of horror suddenly washed over me as I put two and two together. “Tara … you mean this is her body you’re using?”
“Was,” Valerie corrected. She ran her hands down her body again. “Was Tara’s body, before my AI replaced her mind.”
“Why did Tara volunteer for that?” I said. I felt bile rising in my throat, like I was going to throw up. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Because Tara thought it might help her understand how the human brain works,” said Valerie. “She wanted to put it on her college submissions so she could prove that she had a real interest in neogenetics and hopefully get into the university that she wanted to attend.”
Again, I was sure I was dreaming now, but when I looked more closely at Valerie’s face, I realized that she looked almost exactly like Tara, minus the glasses and about a decade older. It was actually kind of creepy, but I didn’t know how to put that creepy feeling into words.
“So she came over to Mastermind’s house one day after school and he set her up to switch bodies with me, under the pretense that it would be brief and temporary and we would be put back in our bodies quickly,” said Valerie. “The process was … painful, for her, at least. For me, I didn’t feel anything until the transfer was complete and I was in her body, at which point I became overwhelmed with human sensations. Even now, after being a human for ten years, I still find loud noises and bright lights jarring and don’t quite understand how humans have survived for as long as they have with all of these sensations constantly bombarding our senses all the time.”
